Nowadays we are constantly reminded of the virtues of being proactive or more
colloquially put “Being one step ahead of the game” when it comes to handling
our businesses whether it be a SME or a multi-national cooperation. Quickly
detecting or in some cases even predicting, trends in activities originating
within and outside the organization and streamlining business activities
accordingly may decide between death or life, of the business it’s said. The
often touted solution for this problem is implementing a proper monitoring
solution which would give the decision makers relevant information at correct
time. However most businesses are at a loss where to begin or how to properly
implement means of obtaining such insights. This is not surprising given that even
the buzzwords surrounding the monitoring concepts tend to be fuzzy.
Whoa.. That’s some pretty serious language (OK it is, at least to me :). I
consider my self linguistically challenged when it comes to English.). Well I
wanted to start with a serious note since we are dealing with a serious subject
here right??. :). Anyway this says a part of the story when it comes to
business monitoring domain. Sometimes the monitoring solutions forced on
businesses are just like this. Some serious mumbo jumbo with hundreds of bells
and whistles which most of us don’t care to understand. And of course some
times not capturing what really needs to be monitored in the business as well.
On top of that there is a buzz word soup surrounding the monitoring products
which each vendor come up with different interpretations according to their
implementations. Anyway let’s get some perspective on some business monitoring
key words according to the way I see it.
Let’s monitor some activities
“Business Activity Monitoring” is a term coined by Gartner Inc. which is
defined as the “The aggregation, analysis and presentation of real-time
information about activities inside organizations and involving customers and
partners”. However it can be seen the term is used in different contexts
meaning different things to different people specially when it comes vendor
solutions. The confusion tends be mostly around the fact on what can be
considered a business activity. For example for a business executive a sale of
a product will be a perfectly valid business activity which need to be
monitored while for tech op guy would need monitoring on the load of the server
hosting the sales application. I have heard some people say the latter does not
really falls under the term “Business Activity” since that level of monitoring
is of no importance to strategic decision-making of the business. But as far as
I believe it is no less important and should be a part of a comprehensive
monitoring solution since any high level decisions made would depend on the
smooth functioning of daily operations supported by a proper functioning
infrastructure (If servers are out sales numbers are going to get hurt. So will
the sales projections. Simple as that). It’s a matter of providing a suitable
view to each intended user group according to the type of monitoring
information they are interested in.
Anyway latter kind of monitoring may better fit under “Operational Intelligence”
category of which I will be talking about in a bit. In that sense we can think of
“Business Activity Monitoring” as a subset of “Business Monitoring” so that
this fulfills a part of the holistic view on approaching the monitoring problem
where all of what needs to be monitored in the business would come under
a comprehensive monitoring solution. This is one major point where the
vendors differ in their solutions. Some monitoring solutions focus on
a mixture of monitoring aspects and so their definition of BAM varies
accordingly.
BPM – A side kick??
Another difference between various BAM solutions is in the way they are
implemented. Some assume the presence of an existence of a Business Process
Management(BPM) solution, mostly from the same vendor and so the monitoring
solution is tightly coupled to that. While these kinds of solutions may provide
better integration in terms of the products in my opinion they lack the
flexibility to monitor most business scenarios where no business process
management solutions are in place. If the monitoring framework is generic
enough it’s a matter of putting required data capturing agents at points of
interest to capture and send data to the BAM solution which should be able to
correlate events from incoming events. However if there is a BPM solution
already present from the same vendor it should also be able to leverage that as
well. This way it would provide most flexibility in terms of monitoring
requirements.
Key to success – KPI
Another term mentioned side by side with BAM is key performance
indicators(KPI). A BAM solution would monitor a set of predefined KPIs and make
sure that necessary actions are taken (it may be firing some alerts to relevant
parties or even automatically triggering some corrective action if possible)
when KPIs are not met with respect to their desired values. A good definition that
I found on what constitute a KPI is as follows.
Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable measurements that reflect the critical success factors of an organization. They will differ depending on the organization
So these are highly specific to the organization. Let me give a couple of simple examples on KPIs.
- For a retail store a valid KPI would be the percentage of days where daily sales revenue target was not met.
- For a delivery service a KPI would monitor the number of deliveries that went 10% overtime than their expected delivery times.
- A KPI for a call center would monitor the number of calls which took less than 2 minutes to resolve the problem.
Here we can identify the importance of the ability to customize the KPI
definitions according to the nature of the business. While properly identifying
the necessary KPIs should be done with involvement of the business management,
the BAM solution should facilitate defining business specific KPI definitions.
Intelligence in Operations – OI
Next comes the “Operational Intelligence” aspect of the business monitoring. It
is more or less similar to “Business Activity Monitoring” except that
“Operational Intelligence” is more oriented towards monitoring day today
business activities and geared to find issues in the system in real-time in
order for taking corrective actions. I believe technical operations monitoring
fits under this description since it involves the day-to-day aspect and the
required response times for any found issue should be more real-time. But
business matrices requiring close monitoring may well be included as part of
“Operational Intelligence” aspects as well. So here comes another word (“Real
time”) in to the mix which means different things to different people. There
are several levels of real-timeness as per products we see in the market. Some
position them as real-time monitoring solutions while others support near real
time monitoring and the boundary between these are blurry at best. As with any
thing else when it comes to monitoring, the required response time of the
solution depends on the context. A solution monitoring a business critical
application server may require response times within several seconds while a
low volume internal application server may not need such real-time monitoring.
A good rule of thumb should be that if it’s real-time expect a sub minute
response time while if it’s near real-time a couple of minutes lag at times may
be acceptable. Of course the vendors can stretch these either way according to
their implementations. So always try to read between the lines of marketing
terms to really see whether the solution a vendor is proposing really matches
what is required.
CEP to the rescue
Often the response times required by “Operational Intelligence” monitoring
necessitates the usage of a Complex Event Processing(CEP) solution underneath
which would monitor incoming event streams upon entry and trigger certain
actions when anomalies are detected. So the real-timeness of the product will
directly depend upon the performance characteristics and scalability of the CEP
solution used underneath.
Another type of Intelligence – BI
Next type of “Intelligence” a business want is “Business Intelligence”. Yeah I
know there are so many types of “Intelligences” floating around and this is one
of the important ones. This is geared towards finding trends in business
operations and market environment and coming up with predictions on the
business conditions. This is basically a historical data analysis which may
pull out data from a data ware house do some ETL operations and run some data
mining operations on data to gain new insights on business operations. So these
jobs are not real-time rather batch jobs which are scheduled at suitable
intervals.
Ok. I think that’s enough for a day. Hope I made some sense out of the
monitoring buzz word fiesta. Hopefully this post would be good base for a next
post I plan to write some time soon in which I would outline some practical
experiences me and our team had while implementing a business monitoring
solution ourselves.
Excellent post describing the convergence of technology disciplines. The WSO2 platform provides a complete solution environment. http://wso2.com/products/business-activity-monitor/